Nontraditional Hack Week Projects Pave Way for Innovation and Accessibility at Spotify

For many, Hack Week brings to mind images of strings of code and furious typing across multiple monitors. And while March 8-12 may have felt like that for some of the thousands of Spotify employees who participated in our annual Hack Week, for others, a successful event looked very different.

For the five days, employees across many teams within and outside of R&D dedicated their time to projects that explored new ways of making Spotify better for creators, consumers, and employees. The week, themed around Making Space, especially gave time to employees who wanted to find better ways of working, for themselves and their colleagues-together and apart.

Kathleen Bright, an Agile Coach based in London, had been thinking about building trust and relationships asynchronously since December. Part of what I do-my professional mission-is understanding that asynchronous collaboration, or working on the same thing but not necessarily at the same time, is something we're not practiced at, they explained. We're asynchronous by default now working remotely, and people are really unfamiliar with that way of working.

According to Kathleen, email, instant messaging, sending documents and slide decks, and relying on video calls are the top ways Spotifiers are connecting with each other in the remote world. But there's also an opportunity to show what asynchronous communication can look like.

One of the things that I've found to be really interesting is that often, when people are talking about asynchronous collaboration or communication, they talk a lot about text and the like-saying we need to get better at writing.' And I think we do need to get better at writing. But there's a risk of us just having massive documents and slide decks flying around even more than we already do, and that's not inclusive or accessible. And so I really wanted to focus on other ways of communicating and bring those in, they said.

Kathleen spent their Hack Week alongside 12 other band members from across the company working on ways to make employees more familiar with different mediums of communication-such as drawing or recording a voice memo-as well as helping teammates build up some confidence with using these tools alongside the ones they're already using. The point isn't, OK, well, instead of text, I'm going to use audio,' but to combine stuff like, OK, so I've got audio and a transcript or subtitles. I've got a doc that includes images and text,' said Kathleen.

In true asynchronous fashion, Kathleen even shared some drawings they had made throughout Hack Week following meetings with their cross-functional team and topic experts at Spotify, including Casey Acierno, Media Responsibility Lead, Social Impact, and Babar Zafar, Vice President of Product Development.

That's something I really appreciate about Hack Week, Kathleen said. How we have a block of time when everyone in R&D (and beyond) is working on this. People you wouldn't normally get to talk to are more available. So I had a meeting with Babar, who is the head of Freemium, my mission. It was really helpful to see where he's at with asynchronous communication.

LINK:	https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-22/nontraditional-hack-week-proje...
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